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The theme of love is especially prominent in the Epistle and
Gospel for this week, both from John. It is a theme to which contemporary
Christians warm very readily since it is relatively ‘theology-lite’, so to speak. Yet
it is easy for it to amount to little more than a rather thin doctrine about
the desirability of care and concern for others. Concern for others is
admirable, certainly, but it hardly requires the Incarnation, Crucifixion and
Resurrection of God to make the case for it. Human decency is enough, surely.
Is there an animating spirit that informs the world in which we
live? Modern materialism makes physical forces and biological processes the
ultimate explanatory factors, and leaves us to conceive of happiness as
enjoying life to the best of our
abilities -- to the extent that life and time will let us. Did Jesus have an enjoyable life? The
question seems all wrong somehow. He tells his followers to "abide in
love", but this love of life, he says, can find its fullest expression in
"laying down one's life for one's friends" -- not ultimate
satisfaction or enjoyment, that is to say, but ultimate sacrifice.
How could that make sense? If the world into which we are
born is indifferent (or even hostile) to our deepest attachments and
aspirations -- love, justice, beauty, truth -- we must wrest from it what we
can while we can, and do so under the constant shadow of our own mortality. But
if those things on which our hearts are most deeply fixed lie at the foundation
of reality, if they are the things that called us into existence in the first
place, then there is a profound harmony between the human spirit and the
creative energy that underlies the world.
Love is ultimate, not because we can make it our Ultimate
Concern, but because the Eternal Word has made it the spirit that infuses all
things. We do not choose God; God has already chosen us.
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